WASHINGTON – The extended outage that occurred on Wednesday on StudentAid.gov, the federal website dedicated to student loans and financial aid, highlighted the dangers associated with hastily reducing the Department of Education. This move is part of President Donald Trump’s efforts to deconstruct the agency.
A considerable number of users reported disruptions with FAFSA on Downdetector during the afternoon of Wednesday, noting difficulties in filling out the form essential for obtaining financial aid in colleges across the country. The National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, a collective of individuals managing financial aid at colleges, also received complaints from users who encountered technical glitches preventing them from completing the FAFSA.
Allie Bidwell Arcese, a spokesperson for NASFAA, mentioned, “We’ve been trying to get more clarity on why it’s down.” She added that the Education Department had not provided any information regarding the outage. Arcese speculated that the workforce reduction from the previous day might have affected the handling of maintenance and troubleshooting tasks.
The developers and IT support staff who worked on the FAFSA form were hard hit in the Education Department’s layoffs Tuesday, along with staff buyouts and the termination of probationary employees. In all, the Education Department has reduced its staff by half, to roughly 2,000, since Trump took office.
A list of laid-off staff obtained and verified by AP shows more than 300 people cut from Federal Student Aid — two dozen of them from Federal Student Aid’s technology division. That included the entire team responsible for systems supporting the FAFSA form, a person with knowledge of the outage told The Associated Press, speaking anonymously for fear of retaliation. While laid-off staffers are still technically employed until March 21, they had limited access to their email, phones and computers, making a response to the outage difficult, the person said. At one point Wednesday, about 70 people had joined a Teams call to try to pinpoint the cause of the outage.
The call continued for hours. By Wednesday evening, the website carried a banner claiming “Planned Maintenance” was underway, and login access was cut off.
The Education Department did not respond to a request for comment on the outage.
Problems with the FAFSA had vexed the administration of former President Joe Biden, drawing rebuke from Republicans. The form was overhauled last year in an attempt to simplify it, but technical problems blocked students from submitting forms or bungled financial aid calculations.
Advocates say the frustration probably led thousands of students to give up on going to college at all. Last fall, U.S. colleges saw a 5% decrease in freshmen enrollment over the previous year, and it was deeper at colleges with large numbers of low-income students, according to the National Student Clearinghouse.
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